Members Of The School Council

September 2017

The School Council was established to provide pupils with a forum for discussion and participation in school decision making. Members of the School Council are voted onto the Council and each class is represented from Reception to Year 6.

The School Council members meet regularly to discuss key issues and members feed back to their classes any decisions / information from the meetings. Members are involved in policy reviews - behaviour and anti-bullying - and give a child's perspective on issues like playtimes, after school clubs, fundraising events and the purchase of new equipment. Discussions are always lively as Council Members raise issues and concerns canvassed from their colleagues in class and the Council's contribution to school life is invaluable.

Council members are also developing their role as mentors for the younger children in school.

2017-2018 - We have had a busy year!

Our Year 6 representatives, Ben and Lily, have each had a turn serving as Vice-Chair and have been excellent examples to the other children, displaying great leadership skills! We have had 11 school council meetings, organised and taken 4 whole school assemblies and been involved in a range of events and activities in our school. We would like to tell you a little bit about some of the things we have been up to this school year…

Meeting with Chip, Chair of the PTA

We enjoyed having Mrs Caldwell and Mrs Ambrose-Smith, from the PTA, attended a school council meeting.

They explained to us the role of the PTA and asked us to consider how money raised by the PTA could be used to benefit our school. We made several suggestions and enjoyed working with the PTA to help plan the Christmas Fayre.

Mrs Martin and Mrs Maxwell helped us to organise a whole school gingerbread making day and we sold our fabulous creations at the Christmas Fayre!

Mrs Shilliam asked the school council to organise the voting for our new house names. We created a ballot box and ballot papers and we officiated on the day, ticking off the names of pupils as they voted and making sure that every child was given the opportunity to vote. After the votes were counted and verified, we announced the results in a school council assembly.

The new houses are now called after the Elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire.

We organised another whole school competition to design a school council logo for us to use during 2017-18.

As a school council, we enjoyed looking at the entries and voted on the designs that we each liked the most. We chose a design by Maisie in Year 6 as the winner and her logo sits proudly on the front of our school council letter box, has been used in our school council assemblies and on official school council letters.

Thank you Maisie for your fabulous design!

We noticed that our KS2 toilet signs were looking a bit old and tired. We decided to run a ‘design a sign’ competition and lots of children submitted bright and colourful designs. As a school council, we judged the wonderful collection of signs and selected a winner, a chess piece design by Isabel in Year 3! Isabel’s signs now take pride of place in our KS2 area.

Well done Isabel!

A note from Mrs Maxwell and Mrs Martin… Our school council children are enthusiastic, reliable and work together as a great team! They grow in confidence as we meet together to work on school projects and events. We are very proud of them, we love working with them and listening to their thoughts and ideas. The school year is not over yet, we have lots more to fit in before the end of the summer term…

We have an exciting school council visit planned in June. We will be going to meet the Lord Mayor of Leicester at the Leicester Town Hall. This is a great opportunity for the children to meet members of Leicester Council and to have a look around the council offices and the Mayor’s Parlour. We have been busy thinking of questions that we would like to ask the Mayor. We will learn about how a city council works, the kinds of work they are involved in and how they run their meetings. We are hoping to see some similarities between Leicester Council and our school council as we each represent the people we serve. We are really looking forward to this visit and telling you all about it on our return.

As a school council we have discussed our lunchtime arrangements. Our cooks and lunchtime supervisors work hard to make lunchtime a lovely experience for us. We have looked at ways to improve our lunchtime routine so that everyone in our school can enjoy eating together. This is something that we are continuing to monitor and as class representatives, we have been asked to discuss lunchtimes again with our class mates, to find out what they think is working well and what might still need to be improved. We will report back at our next school council meeting and consult with Mrs Shilliam to share thoughts and ideas from the children we represent.